Now and then I hear that reference service differs between public libraries and academic libraries in that public libraries give answers, whereas academic libraries teach.

I’ve never accepted this definition. True, it is not useful to make distinctions when you are running a collaborative multi-type reference service, but mostly, I just don’t see it, and besides, the conversation about libraries is more interesting to me when we seek difficult truths instead of simple niceties.

The days of people coming to the American public library for answers, if they ever existed, are long gone. So are the naive days of the humble scholar who seeks the authority and expertise of his betters. People come to reference services to begin or continue on a story in their lives. Public library reference services help people complete their stories, and so help make them better citizens. Academic library reference service help make people better scholars. Or we could say that all libraries help make people better citizen-scholars.

You may recognize that I’m building on Anne-Marie’s idea talks that the library has a role in welcoming people to “the community of scholars”, which has long impressed and puzzled me because I couldn’t think of a corollary for public libraries. So now I have, and before I get too smug I’m going to change the subject and try to illustrate why helping people be citizen-scholars is important.

In preparation for my wedding a few years ago, I wanted to have a suit made. I don’t usually go for formal wear, and haven’t worn a tie since the last millennium, but in this case, I thought dressing up would be fun. So I shopped around for tailors in Portland and found someone who would measure me and fax my dimensions to Hong Kong for what I thought I was reasonable price.

I went into it looking for a linen suit, one not too flashy and that I could wear again in summer or winter, thinking that if I’m going to have a suit made I might as well wear it more than once. The tailor didn’t have any fabric swatches I liked. There weren’t that many and the selection was poor. Instead of finding a new tailor with better fabrics, the tailor helped me choose a shiny Crater Lake blue silk. It wasn’t what I went in wanting, but I left happy, and I’m still happy about it.

From a customer service perspective, here was a salesmen. Some guy walks in off the street and says he’s getting married, but wants something you don’t have. You sell him something you do. Give that man his commission.

I have received this same treatment in library reference service, and am less pleased with the result. One time I asked a colleague for help identifying possible call number ranges to explore Kuniyoshi, an ukiyo-e artist active in the mid-19th century. I was thinking I probably wouldn’t find any more monographs about the artist (I checked the catalog and found one), but I wanted help finding books about ukiyo-e in general, the time period, broad tomes about Japanese art, about printmaking, and anything else that was remotely related. I was prepared for trips to other libraries and museums, for interlibrary loan requests, but I knew my art reference skills are shallow and rusty. Finding someone on the desk who had been working with our collection longer than I had been alive should have been a stroke of luck.

But it was a stroke of bad luck. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong with the reference interview, but I ended up with the same treatment that I got from the Hong Kong suit guys - instead of taking the trouble to help get me what I said I really wanted, I got some nice encyclopedia entries instead.

This is bad service. The library might not be able to provide me with a comprehensive catalog of the artist’s body of work put into social, political and art-historical context, but it should provide me the resources to begin creating one. So perhaps this is a difference between service in a sales context and service in a library context: I shouldn’t leave the library satisfied. I should leave thirsty, heading out into the world for more. “Welcome to the community of citizens”, the library should say, “it is yours to make better”. In effect, by being given (and accepting - I was on break) a simple answer to my question, I was discouraged from being a better citizen-scholar.

More recently I was riding the bus and couldn’t help overhearing (really! I forgot my ipod) a woman complaining about her experience giving birth to her daughter at a local hospital. When it came time to fill out a birth certificate, the nurse wrote down, R-A-C-H-E-L where the mother wanted to name her child R-A-C-H-E-L-L-E.

Now, without getting all Freakonomics on anyone, the mother explained that this was “the French Canadian way”, and it was clearly important to her and distressing that the hospital had taken away her choice.

Having recently filled out a birth certificate form myself, I now know that no one told this woman that she could have reviewed the birth certificate and corrected it once it was filed. I found this out at the hospital. Why didn’t the woman on the bus? Didn’t she know that the hospital was supposed to work for her?

For starters, I read the fine print. Not everyone does, but we can’t really blame bus-woman for not doing it. If she was having a nurse fill out a birth certificate form, it is possible she didn’t have a partner with her to advocate on her behalf.

On top of that it is extremely likely that the woman was using serious pain relievers during her labor and delivery. According to a mostly-online survey called Listening to Mothers II, 86% of women do (see page 31 of the survey, page 43 of the PDF).

Of course, with or without pain relief, labor and delivery can be exhausting. And then women are given paperwork to fill out? No wonder the woman on the bus felt disempowered by the hospital. And it strikes me that she was, not by design, but through the assumption that people will have pro-active family support to help them through a difficult procedure. Hospitals should know better.

I think libraries do, and it’s not perfect, but I think the reference interview is a good tool to keep this from happening. In a reference interview, the librarian is supposed to make sure that the patron and the librarian agree on what the question is before seeking out the answer together. It is not easy, but it can empower people. To be citizen-scholars!

Change your name @ the library. How does that sound?